I have found that the scale comes in most handy when I want to weigh a small amount of a substance for which weight-to-volume conversion data is not readily or conveniently available. But, for the most part, I have found that standard weight-to-volume conversion data, even if it comes from or is derived from packaging information (that may not be 100% precise), is usually good enough for my purposes. The scale is a neat thing to have handy, and for me to spend around $25 for it (including shipping and insurance) so that I can do my experiments, it is worth having. Otherwise, I think I could live without it if I had to since I already have a pretty good list of conversion data for pizza related ingredients.

The presence of bubbles in a dough doesn’t necessarily mean that something is wrong, at least not in a fatal sense, but it may mean that too much yeast was used or that the dough management (especially temperature control) was less than optimal. Bubbles can certainly appear when a dough is overfermented or on the verge of overfermentation. With a properly made cold fermented dough using the new method, I estimate that there is about another day, or possibly two days, left of useful life after the bubbles first appear. When the bubbles first start to protrude from the surface of the cold fermented doughs I make, I press down on the dough to see if it is still firm. If it is, I figure there is about another day or so left to use it to be on the safe side, so I don’t worry. If the dough were soft and pillowy and flabby and appearing like it wants to deflate, then I would want to use it as soon as possible. I also look for the appearance of a profusion of small bubbles at the sides and bottom of the dough. To see these of course requires that the container that holds the dough be transparent or translucent.

I have also found that the degree of spreading and flattening of the dough while in the refrigerator is a pretty good indicator or marker of the potential useful life of the dough. I put the dough into the container shaped into a ball. I then watch to see how quickly it spreads. If the dough doesn’t spread and flatten quickly, it is likely that the dough will have a good long useful life, typically six days or more. With the right formulation and processing, it can be 10-12 days. If the dough ball flattens and spread quickly, whether it is because of temperature factors or other factors, as chiguy has noted, then its useful life is likely to be shorter, perhaps in the 4-5 day range. Each dough has its own mind, so you have to rely on experience to a great degree.

If prolongation of the usable life of the dough is an objective, then there are ways of achieving that objective. I still have a few more experiments to perform with the new dough making method, so there is still more to be learned on this particular aspect, but I would say that using cold water, along with small quantities of yeast, will help achieve that objective. I would also add the salt and yeast toward the end of the dough making process rather than at the beginning. I also often use a metal container to store the dough while it is in the refrigerator in order to cool the dough down a bit faster. If you really want to be anal about it, you can even pre-cool the metal container in the refrigerator for a while before putting the dough into it.

I think this is one of the main reasons why I am always so disappointed with the "famous" pizzerias. At home we have the luxury of being able to use the dough right at it's peak, while commercial pizzerias need to use their dough from the same mix over a period of hours, or sometimes even days if they are retarding.

When I first started my experimentation with the new method, I was attempting to incorporate as many aspects of the classic Calvel autolyse process as possible. About the only autolyse feature I did not use was the rest period, mainly because I wanted to be able to make the dough as quickly as possible, and I also didn't want the dough to warm up much during a typical 5-30 minute autolyse rest period (depending on whose advice one follows). As best I have been able to determine, the classical autolyse was not used with bread doughs using oil. However, my practice has been to add the oil at the end of the dough making process in order not to interfere with the hydration of the flour. This is a technique that is espoused by Tom Lehmann. I have often wondered about it, and especially so after seeing that November doesn't seem to be following that technique. That leads me to believe that November has good reason for not isolating the oil in his dough making process. It also occurs to me that if prolonging the useful life of a dough is an objective, maybe it is a good idea to add the oil at the beginning, just as you did, rather than the end. This is something I will have to test out sometime.

I don't think that the amount of yeast you used was too much. In fact, I often recommend that the amount of yeast be increased in the wintertime (and/or use warmer water) just to be on the safe side. The key temperature in my opinion is the finished dough temperature. Usually I temperature adjust the water to get the desired finished dough temperature but with the new method I found that I didn't have to worry about it when I used the water right out of the refrigerator. Also, the use of the whisk, even at pretty good speeds, and the flat beater don't seem to add much heat to the dough for the durations that they are deployed.

As a factoid, you might want to keep in mind that, according to General Mills, for each 15 degrees F rise in finished dough temperature (up to 100 degrees F), the rate of fermentation doubles. That may have been a greater factor in your case than the slight increase in yeast. The last dough I made had a finished dough temperature of around 65 degrees F. You indicated that yours was around 80 degrees F. There are undoubtedly other factors at work but temperature is a critical element.

The only experience I've had with the small scales is the My Weigh 300-Z scale. The Durascale model you referenced is accurate to 0.01 g. (as opposed to 0.1 g. for mine), but its maximum capacity is only 50 g. (compared to 300 g. for mine). So, it would depend on how you plan to use the scale. I went back and checked all of the dough formulations posted in this thread and certainly the Durascale scale can handle all of the small quantities involved (beyond the flour and water), and in multiples if desired (up to a maximum of 50 g., of course). What I can't tell you is how significant the accuracy is and whether the results are better than using the posted volume measurements. I know that pftaylor uses a small scale (a discontinued Frieling model) for his Raquel doughs and he swears by his scale, but he is the only other member I can recall who uses a small scale. Based on my experience with the 300-Z, I wouldn't personally hesitate to buy another My Weigh product because they seem to be held in high regard by scale users.

I have been using an IBal 201 scale for about a year. I originally got it to weight out spices for my sausage making. It has also serviced me well for weighing out hops for brewing and now I have pressed it into service for pizza making.

It has also been borrowed by other brewers to weigh out priming sugar.

This is not the place I purchased it from but it will give you a general description of it.

As best I have been able to determine, the classical autolyse was not used with bread doughs using oil. However, my practice has been to add the oil at the end of the dough making process in order not to interfere with the hydration of the flour.

Peter,

I believe I can watch the flour become hydrated as the wisk beats it into the water. At one point in the process, the flour just slips into a batter like consistancy. It is at this instant that I believe the flour has become significantly hydrated. This is also when I add more flour. The wisk eliminates the rest period through mechanical means, quickly and effectively. It is an eloquent solution, i.e., both faster and at least as good as a autolyse rest period. For me, this change is a major leap in process technology. Now I can work much faster, producing dough 2-3 times as fast as before.

Thank-you for the info. on the scale. Being an Accountant I love things to be exact. Some call it anal but I love to insure repeatability.

Another question that I have is about Oil. I noticed the difference in flavor when I use olive oil versus vegetable oil in the dough formulation, the flavor is really noticeable. Have you experimented with dough flavoring as connected to the flavor of different oil types and brands? I read in one of the threads that Classico Olive oil is recommended by a member, any take on this angle? As related to flavoring alternatives.

For the doughs I have made and discussed in this thread I have tended to use primarily the Classico olive oil (yellow label). It has a pleasant, but not overpowering flavor. Professionals tend to use vegetable (salad) oils because they are less expensive than olive oils. Very few use extra virgin olive oil in their doughs, but they may use a bit on top of the pizza for richness and flavor. This is one of those areas where you should just experiment with different oils to see which you like the best. As an example, I recently purchased some rice bran oil and plan to do some testing with it, for the reasons given in this post: http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,4423.msg36927.html#msg36927 (Reply 5).

For full disclosure on my part, I use rice bran oil as my standard oil, but when I want to blend it 50/50 with an olive oil, I use Tera Extra Virgin Olive Oil. When I want to use olive oil by itself, I use Lucini Premium Select Extra Virgin Olive Oil because of its explicitly stated ultra-low acidity (0.2-0.4%) and purity.

As a factoid, you might want to keep in mind that, according to General Mills, for each 15 degrees F rise in finished dough temperature (up to 100 degrees F), the rate of fermentation doubles.

I think in this case General Mills is oversimplifying the fermentation rate for those who don't want to use a calculator. When I compare their statement against actual empirical data, it just doesn't fit. A far more accurate equation to use if you have a calculator would be:

fermentation rate coefficient = sin((T/36)2)where fermentation rate coefficient is the percentage (in decimal form) of the maximum fermentative output of the yeast and T is the temperature in degrees Celsius

The equation is intended to work within the range of 0°C (32°F) to 63.8°C (146.84°F, thermal cell death) and has been verified within the range of 0°C to 40°C (104°F). Be sure to have your calculator in radian mode, not degree mode.

- red.november

EDIT: I'm making a graph available to those who want to see the difference between actual data and the two calculation methods (i.e. General Mills and above equation). The dashed purple line represents a cubic spline interpolation of actual data. The solid green area represents the General Mills method of calculation. The solid gray line represents the above equation.

This shows max production at around 38 degrees c (100.4 f) with a fairly steep drop after that.

This is table for "liquid ferments" though.

Baker's yeast is much more heat tolerant today (compared to the 1950's) and can proceed very productively into the 40°-50°C range. The liquid versus dough fermentation makes a pretty good difference too. The equation I derived was based on several dough tests, some of them mine, two of them from another research group. Here is a graph of the full range using the the higher precision exponent (2.1057714475):

In all, I did three dough experiments. All three of the doughs were made using only flour, water (room temperature), salt and yeast (IDY). No oil and no sugar. This is basically the set of ingredients recommended by Evelyne Slomon to make the classic NY style pizza. Two of the doughs used all-purpose flour (General Mills Gold Medal), and the third used high-gluten flour (King Arthur Sir Lancelot). All doughs weighed about 16 ounces and were subjected to the same dough management. Specifically, once the doughs were made, they were left at room temperature (around 69 degrees F) for about 3 hours, degassed and re-rounded, and then put into covered containers and into the refrigerator for 24 hours. Upon removal from the refrigerator, the dough balls were allowed to warm up at room temperature (around 69 degrees F) for two hours before shaping and stretching out to size (15” and beyond).

A few comments about the above dough formulations are in order. First, for the two all-purpose doughs, using the two different dough making methods, I used a hydration of 65%. That is high for an all-purpose flour, but I was able to make the doughs without any difficulty using either method. Normally, an all-purpose flour has an absorption rate of around 61% +/- 2%. However, the “operational absorption” used by bakers can be 2-4% more, and, allowing for the possibility of the flour having a reduced moisture content and the effects of room humidity, the flour can frequently tolerate a higher than rated absorption. On this basis, I used 65%. Following the same analysis, I decided to use 69% hydration for the KASL.

Procedurally, I made the doughs by dissolving the salt in the water, then stirring in the IDY (as Evelyne has recommended for a home setting), and then gradually adding the flour, which had been sifted. For the first GM all-purpose dough (GMAP1) and for the KASL dough, I used the combination of whisk, flat beater and the C-hook. For the second GMAP2 dough, I used the former method as referenced in the link above. The finished dough temperatures out of the bowl were 69 degrees F for the two GM doughs, and around 67 degrees F for the KASL dough. To compensate for minor dough losses in the bowl, I increased the ingredient quantities by 2.5%. Doing that produced the final 16-ounce dough ball weights.

In terms of the overall quality of the two all-purpose doughs made using the two different dough making methods, the GMAP1 dough was markedly better than the GMAP2 dough. The GMAP1 dough had exceptional extensibility with a uniform thickness throughout. I was able to stretch out the dough—which weighed only 16 ounces—to 15” with ease. To see how far I could then stretch out the dough, I continued to stretch it out to about 24” inches. At that point, the dough was as diaphanous as the dough shown at Jeff V.’s website. Beyond 24”, the dough started to tear. The best I could do with the GMAP2 dough before it started to tear was around 20”, and the dough thickness was uneven. The first photo below shows the GMAP1 dough at the 18” point. If one looks carefully, the grid pattern of the 18” screen on which the dough was placed can be seen in several places.

Because the GMAP1 and GMAP2 doughs were experimental and solely for comparing the two dough making methods, I did not use them to make finished pizzas. The doughs were simply discarded. The importance of the two tests to me was that the new dough making method has significant merit. The results also suggest that the way a dough is made has a pronounced effect on how it will perform at a later stage. I also now believe that the machine used to make the dough may be the most significant factor in final dough quality, whether it is a DLX or a Santos, or a higher-end KitchenAid with a spiral hook, or my simple KitchenAid mixer with a C-hook using the modified processes. The GMAP1 dough was as good as any I have ever made from the standpoint of handling qualities.

The KASL dough was used to make an actual pizza. That dough also handled well although it was quite extensible, a condition that I attributed to the very high hydration. Even though I had no problems stretching the dough out to 15”, the desired final size, I think it may be better to use a somewhat lower hydration next time, possibly 67%. The second and third photos show the finished pizza using the KASL dough. The toppings were a combination of portobello mushrooms, red and green peppers, and pepperoni. Because the dressed pizza was larger than my pizza stone, I baked the pizza on a dark, anodized pizzatools.com perforated disk (16”) which I placed on a pizza stone that had been preheated on the lowest oven rack position for about an hour at around 500-550 degrees F. Once the crust set up, I removed the disk and allowed the pizza to finish baking on the stone. The total bake time was around 8 minutes. I am sure that using a pizza screen in the normal method I use will also work well.

My latest experiment using the new dough making method discussed in this thread was to test the effects of adding the oil to the dough mixture early in the process rather than toward the end, which has been my more or less standard practice (and the one recommended by Tom Lehmann). The idea to incorporate the oil early in the process came from a recent post by member November, who routinely combines oil with water, flour and other ingredients. He notes that the uniformity of incorporation of the oil into the dough is as important as when it is incorporated. What I wanted to test is whether the early incorporation of oil in the dough would hamper hydration of the flour or produce other possible unwanted effects. For purposes of the latest test, I used the following Lehmann dough formulation:

Although not indicated in the above table, I used a thickness factor of 0.10 and increased the amounts of the ingredients by 2.5% to compensate for minor dough losses in the bowl. Doing this increased the thickness factor to 0.1025, as noted in the table.

For purposes of the test, I sifted the flour (King Arthur Sir Lancelot), and used the whisk, flat beater and C-hook combination I have been using for the new dough making method. More specifically, I added the water (directly out of the refrigerator, at 41.6 degrees F) to the mixer bowl and, with the whisk attached and the mixer at stir speed, gradually added the flour to the bowl. As the whisk filled up with the batter-like dough and started to groan--after about 2/3 of the flour had been added to the bowl--I added the oil. Since the dough was not stiff at this stage, the oil was easily and uniformly incorporated into the dough, which took about a minute or so. I then replaced the whisk with the flat beater. I then gradually added the rest of the flour along with the yeast (IDY) and salt. As the remaining ingredients were incorporated into the dough, also at stir speed, I concluded that the dough needed a bit more water. I added one teaspoon (which had the effect of increasing the hydration from 65% to 66.8%) and after that was incorporated into the dough, I replaced the flat beater with the C-hook. It took about a minute of kneading by the C-hook, at stir/1 speed, to finish the dough. I then “punched and kneaded” the dough for about 30 seconds, shaped it into a round ball, oiled it, and then placed it in a lidded metal container to go into the refrigerator. The dough weighed 15.7 ounces and had a finished dough temperature of 64.4 degrees F.

The dough remained in the refrigerator for 15 days. Over the course of the 15 days, the dough went through several transformations. It went from a round ball to a flattened disk, and then expanded laterally to fill up the entire bottom of the container, much like a large pancake. At around day 6 or 7, the dough started to develop a spotted effect just below the top surface, giving the dough a grayish coloration. As I discovered before from other experiments, the gray tint to the dough is just at the top surface. The bottom looks normal. The spotting effect gradually increased until the time I decided to use the dough—at day 15. I might add that the dough showed no signs of overfermentation, like protruding bubbles or sagging dough, so that was not the reason I decided to use the dough. I just felt that 15 days was long enough. When I finally shaped and stretched the dough, it behaved quite normally and I concluded that the dough could have lasted at least a few more days. The dough was extensible, but not overly so, and had good windowpaning and a uniform thickness as I stretched the dough out with ease to its final size of 14”.

The photos below show the finished pizza. The toppings were fresh sliced mushrooms, red and green peppers, sweet onion (Texas 1015), and pepperoni slices. As can be seen from the photos, there was plenty of residual sugar in the dough at the time of baking to contribute to ample browning of the crust even though no sugar was added to the dough. I could also detect a mild sweetness in the crust. It was not as pronounced as prior efforts, but there nonetheless.

The pizza was baked directly on my pizza stone (at the lowest oven rack position) which I had preheated for about an hour at around 500-550 degrees F. The pizza was baked on the stone for about 7 minutes, whereupon I moved the pizza to the upper rack position to finish baking, for about another minute or so. There was good oven spring, with a flavorful and chewy crust. I could not conclude that the flavor of the crust was better at 15 days than one with far fewer days, or at least my palate couldn’t detect it. Of course, the benefit of a 15-day dough is that it can remain in the refrigerator for quite a long time without fear of overrising or overfermenting, and still be of high quality and easily managed. The experiment also confirmed that the oil can be added to the dough in the early stages (e.g., during the whisk stage) and not adversely affect the hydration of the flour or the dough or finished crust.

Knowing how you favor room-temperature fermentation over cold fermentation, I am sure you didn't wait 15 days for your pizza .

I also know that you are a big advocate of using oil in a dough, and apportioning the formula oil between the oil used in the dough and the oil on the dough. I recently made a classic NY style pizza (reported earlier in this thread) in which there was no oil in the dough at all, and it seemed to me that I could tell that it was missing when I tasted the crust (which I also thought was low on salt). I suspect that there are some sound principles involved in the way oil is used in a dough formulation, but I wonder if you could explain the rationale behind your use of oil in making pizza dough, and also how one might calculate the apportionment of the formula oil between the inside and outside of the dough, perhaps using the amount of oil I specified in the last Lehmann dough formulation? I'd be more than happy with the CliffsNotes explanation if there is one.

I was also wondering whether the dark spots just under the top surface of the dough were due to the oil, or possibly some effects of oxidation as I opened the container from time to time to inspect the dough. As you know, the bottom of the dough is unaffected, only the top. In fact, in my case, the bottom had a nice, normal yellow coloration, even after 15 days. I even thought to flip the dough over part way through the fermentation period to see what would happen. I decided against it because I didn't want to abort the experiment I was conducting.